Opinión

I still remember the first time I felt my first electoral disappointment. I was seven years-old when my Mom told me “Chavez won the presidencial elections”. I didn’t understand much about but I certainly knew he was bad. Eighteen years later, we (the Venezuelans) don’t know nothing more but disappointments when it comes to electoral processes.

Last night’s disappointment over Trump’s victory is something extremely familiar for Venezuelans who currently live in the United States. Not only because the democratic party lost the elections, but for seeing someone like Trump winning. Even though I believe Chavez and Trump represent two completely different ideologies of the political spectrum, they both projected the same thing: A speech of resentment. That is how endless comparisons started among Venezuelans.

Apparently, a speech of resentment is what will ensure you the victory if you run as for the presidential elections in any country. That is what Chavez did with the lower classes in Venezuela, after many attempts of failed social democracy models. That is what Trump did with the Americans, after two failed attempts of a democrat administrations. The solution from Chavez was to move farther to the left, whereas Trump’s one is to move farther to the right.

Nevertheless, Trump’s resentment speech is what concerns me the least. At the end of the day, what kind of politician does not use a rhetoric argument to win more votes? (Rational voters are a myth, and Bryan Caplan wrote a whole book about this).

What really concerns me about this new Trump era is that tyranny side he seems to posses. Almost one year ago, I wrote about my thoughts on Trump’s campaign (by that time we were still at the primaries), making special emphasis on the case of Vera Coking and he’s abuse on eminent domain. If you haven’t heard about this (and you’re able to read in Spanish), you can check out my post here. A case like this one had made me question if Trump really represents the traditional Republican values that I really cherish, or if he really will aim to protect the Americans’ individual rights.

However, at the end of the day these elections were about two evil candidates battling against each other. Was Trump the least evil of both?

Disclaimer: This post right here is to communicate how frustrated I feel about socialism and everything related to it. So, in case you’re sensitive to this kind of stuff please scroll it down, or go to the running section of this blog or just don’t read this blog whatsoever.

For those of you who don’t know me, I was born and raised in Venezuela. Even though free markets economy is something that my country has barely known, I always rejected intuitively the ideas from the left. And when I discovered Libertarianism back in the day, I felt instantly related. I became a libertarian and never changed my mind. End of the story.

But the worst part of discovering the ideas of liberty is that when you become more conscious about your rights, the injustices of socialism start affecting you more. It happened to me while living in there and it continues to happen as I read the news about Venezuela every day.

In case you don’t read the news, everything that could possibly go wrong in a country is going amazingly wrong down there. Scarcity of food and medicine, increasing poverty and debt, lack of individual rights and private property, electricity shortages, and growing levels of violence in the streets are only a few of the problems that Venezuela faces at the moment.

As if that wasn’t enough, the border with Colombia is closed for Venezuelans. So, they’re basically unable to go there and get food or medicines. No wonder why 35,000 Venezuelans walked desperately to the border with that same purpose, when they opened it temporarily last month. Watching those images was painful enough to me, but not as reading this article today.

Nicolas Maduro enabled an executive order of conscripting Venezuelans to do up to 60 days of forced labor on farms, with the aim of producing more food “if circumstances merit”. Let me put this in other words, the government closed every single window that could slightly improve the situation in the country. Instead, they force to implement the less viable and more retrograde option to produce food, bypassing the judgment of the Congress. Just like Glenn Garvin wrote today in the Miami Herald:

“Venezuela resorts to slavery to feed people, the slaves”.

But the best part of this article wasn’t this incredibly accurate quote. It was actually this one:

“Now that Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign is finally over, maybe he’ll have time to read the news from Venezuela”

Some people believe that socialism is an idea of faith. Something that starts with good intentions and end up being poorly executed. Well, I’m convinced that socialism is the pure idea of evil. If you don’t think so, then it’s because you haven’t been close enough to it.

Meet Adolfo Chacón and Marco González. They both work for Liberty in Venezuela.

I met Adolfo in 2013 at one of the summer seminars of Cato Institute for Latin America, held at Dominican Republic. We were both part the small group of Venezuelans who were starting their journey towards defending the ideas of liberty. Nowadays, he has grown professionally to become the coordinator of CEDICE Joven, which is a division of one of the most important think tanks in Latin America (Ironically located at Caracas, Venezuela). Yup, I’m a proud friend.

Marco is also an integrant of CEDICE Joven and Student for Liberty for Latin-America. As a libertarian, he believes that the all intellectual changes that Venezuela needs are possible trough political action. They both have an important work on educating young Venezuelans towards the ideas of liberty.

Today, the community of libertarians at Venezuela has increased ten times in comparison to what it was three years ago. This is the result of pure hard work coming from these people and all leaders from CEDICE. Let me say that this has not achieved though coercive action. Not though any source of violence, but trough knowledge, books, and substantial debates.

Unfortunately, Socialism has been destructing the country at an unstoppable pace. The scarcity of basic resources like food and medicine has forced all Venezuelans to live just exactly as Karl Marx pictured The New Man. The average population keeps becoming poor as the value of bolivars keeps going down. But becoming the Soviet Union/Cuba of this century is not enough, given the fact that problems of gangs and violence in the streets has gone to levels never seen before in Latin America.

In other words, every single aspect related to Venezuela has become a catastrophe. That is all.

Ironically, this devastation started with a bunch of people who was disappointed of a big government. Of course, they decided that the right solution was to bet for a bigger government, where a model of central planning called socialism of 21st century was going to be implemented. A nasty version of pure scientific socialism.

Hence why is super important to keep defending the ideas of Liberty. Venezuela is not only a country that needs to be saved out of this misery, but is also the perfect example of what not to do when trying to get better results out of a government. An example that all U.S. democrat voters should take into account before even considering social democracy as a way to go.

Now, back to Adolfo and Marco. I started this post mentioning them because they were recently awarded with a scholarship for taking a summer program at Fundación Para el Progreso in Chile, (which is another very important Think Tank in Latin America). This is not only the perfect opportunity for them as leaders to bring back some quality knowledge to Venezuela, but also to speak up about what’s really going on in there.

Even though this scholarship is for the program itself, it does not cover any transportation expenses. Therefore, they started this fundraising campaign in order to afford the plane tickers to Chile.

When they kindly asked me to post this link on my blog, of course I was not going to say no.

So I’m going to leave the it here in case you’d like to donate. And in case you can’t donate but still want to help, spread the word and share it on your Social Media so that more people can see it. They’ll be beyond grateful.

Think about it. You’d be making a small contribution to liberty with just one click.